Solving surly problems

Recently, someone said to me, “You’re an interesting contradiction, you genuinely like people, however you can’t stand idiots, which makes you surly most of the time”. Of course I didn’t like that, and promptly got a bit introspective about it – which is effectively the label adults place on sulkiness

But it appears I have been a bit surly, and frankly, a bit closed-minded lately, so I thought I should get out more, meet some new people in different areas and suspend judgement. Consequently I found myself at a Creative Performance Exchange event at 7:45am this morning called “A Date with Design Thinking”.

The session started with the remark, “Design Thinking can’t be explained easily, it must be experienced.” This put my back up, but remembering my friend’s remarks, I decided to be open-minded and stay happy as the morning unfolded – and frankly, I’m glad that I did. What I picked up, although a little too quickly glorified by the design types in the audience, was in fact a really useful problem-solving tool to have in my tool kit.

From my understanding, Design Thinking is a problem-solving technique that puts the person with the problem at the centre, and then uses creative skills to facilitate better insight into the problem, which leads to a better quality answer.

There are apparently lots of different ways of going about it, but we used the following methodology – to design a wallet.

1. Interview the person to find out what their needs are, then dig a little deeper to find out their background, motivations, emotions about the issue, etc.
2. From what you learn, reframe the problem for them, outlining your understandings and getting feedback.
3. Create a number of radical, and potentially outrageously non-viable prototype solutions – not to actually solve their problem, but to test the boundaries of your understanding of the parts of problem.
4. Extract new insights around the issues and the feelings of the problem owner now that you have pushed them out of their comfort zone.
5. Utilise all the feedback to come up with a serious solution and get feedback on that.
6. Iterate any part of the sequence until you’re done.

The thing I liked about Design Thinking was that it was a methodology for dealing in areas where the problem may actually be poorly understood, wrong, part of a bigger problem, wicked or not a problem at all. The methodology facilitates the user to understand what his problem actually is, and helps him come up with the solution.

The most obvious thing I didn’t like about it was of course I’s not useful if you have some external constraints – like we need to make a decision before 12:30pm. But then again that’s why I have other tools in there like Military Style Appreciations and Systems Thinking.

So coming back to my friend, who claimed I was a bit surly, I realised that maybe if I didn’t like his solution – labelling me as surly – maybe it was because we hadn’t actually go to the heart of the problem. Maybe it’s not the idiots that make me surly.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.